A wonderful tidbit of information from this morning’s COP17/CMP7 plenary meeting: the outgoing President of COP16/CMP6 is Patricia Espinosa of Mexico, the incoming President of COP17/CMP7 is Ms. Nkoana-Mashabane of South Africa, and the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC is Christina Figueres. Notice anything in common? Power to the women in leadership positions!…

Greetings from Durban, South Africa! My name is Lauren Graham (MEM, 2013) and I am here at the COP17 representing Team Red Cross (TRC) that also includes Kanchan, Vanessa and Sophia from the International Organizations & Conferences course. This semester, we have been working with Pablo Suarez of the Red Cross Climate Centre to examine various issues related to climate change and humanitarian response. I have personally been evaluating how well climate change information has been integrated into the disaster response policy of RC national societies. Look out for another blog post with a summary on TRC’s work over the past few months.

The 17th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change has begun. COP17/CMP7 officially got underway this morning in Durban South Africa but the Yale crew attending the conference got underway on Friday.

We arrived at the Ballito Life Hotel on Sunday Nov 27th at 5:40 PM. For me this was 47 hours after leaving New Haven. The total air time was just over 18 hours with a short layover in Amsterdam and a night spent in Johannesburg. After getting some food I did a little work on my Sustainable Development final paper, which is due this Thursday, and went to bed. I got up at 5:35AM to go for a short run. Our hotel is an hour bus ride from the…

As negotiators head to Durban, South Africa for the next round of the UNFCCC climate negotiations, China can point to significant progress in domestic climate policy since the Cancun negotiations a year ago. March, 2011 saw the adoption of China’s 12th Five-Year Plan, binding domestically China’s first phase of its Copenhagen and Cancun commitments to reduce its carbon intensity 40 to 45 percent by 2020. In this first year of the new Five Year Plan, China also adopted a number of specific climate-related implementation measures (For a more exhaustive list, see China’s just published White Paper on its climate change activities).

Over the past several months, we (self-described Team Latvia) have been working hard to decipher Latvian climate policy and to determine Latvia’s stake in the upcoming COP negotiations. Latvia is a Baltic state, which gained its independence in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union. The official Latvian Tourism Portal states that “the best thing about Latvia is that it is so compact.” We believe Latvia’s small size is only one of its many assets. We are also proud to note that all three of us could locate Latvia on a map before this project began. Grant even has some family connections (Hawaii-Latvia, who knew?)

-

But, to us, Latvia is now no longer just a location far, far away on a map. Having worked closely with members

The F&ES Admissions Committee consists of 2 staff members and 10 faculty members, and we all actively review application files. Our goal is to select students from a wide variety of backgrounds – academically, geographically and professionally. We do not want our students to look alike, think alike, dream alike or sound alike. We want a class that, when taken together, has a sum greater than all of its individual parts. So what does this mean for you?

First and foremost, we conduct holistic application reviews looking at your 1) academic preparation, 2) your commitment to the “environment” (whatever your specific area of interest), and 3) your experience/leadership/maturity.

After two long months of recruitment travel where I met with prospective students, alumni and advisors across the country (from Boston to Honolulu and too many cities to mention in between), I have finally arrived back in New Haven. I’ve got to say, it was a joyous reunion with the “Elm City.” As I’ve mentioned previously, the travel season is really one of my favorite parts of the job, since I get to meet so many of you (and get to see the country too, while I’m at it!) but life on the road gets a bit old after a while. Lugging bags everywhere, airport delays, or stressing about missing FedEx boxes quickly loses its glamour… But, I’m most excited for my time back in New Haven simply because I…

We have received lots of phone calls and emails about our new requirement that international transcripts be evaluated. I realize that many of you may be confused by this is extra step in the application process, and may wonder why we have created this requirement when none of our peer institutions are doing so. First, let me state that our policies are not based upon what other Yale programs or peer universities require. The decision to ask for evaluations was not made lightly, and stemmed from a few different issues. Most importantly, evaluation is the only way we feel that we can fairly consider transcripts from all different educational systems. And, unfortunately, there have been suspected instances of transcript fraud. So, in a sense, we have a situation where one…

Time passes at lightening speed when you are going through midterms. During a stretch of two weeks, you feel as though your life revolves around these exams that were never designed to give you a hard time, but simply to identify your level of progress. The second-years all tell us first-years that we are taking school too seriously. “Grades do not matter here,” they tell us with an air of maturity, and we agree with the nodding of our heads. However, as soon as they have their backs turned to us, we embark on sleepless nights of essay writing, information cramming, and other such scholarly activities. The midterms were rocky, and perhaps we took it all too seriously